Hazard Mitigation

Emergency situations (hazards) of natural, man-made and terrorist causes occasionally occur in a random time and place and significantly affect the livelihoods of the population of municipalities, thereby becoming public attention and cause rejection of population-related disaster risks. Therefore, the issues of prevention and hazard mitigation in the event of a valid and should have high priority in local government.

There are six classes of hazards released by 4 parameters characterizing the effects of emergencies. Adverse events with consequences, not classified as emergencies are treated as an accident. In accordance with the existing division of authority for the elimination of emergency situations at the local level respond to local governments. Industrial Safety and Environmental Management are among most important spheres of concern.

Social losses to the country’s population from emergencies are estimated by the number of victims, and the social distribution of risk by the number of emergency patients. Among the local emergency largest proportion of accidents in the heating systems in cold weather (24%), fire (explosion) in buildings of residential, welfare and cultural facilities (18%), accidents at electric power systems (9%), accident on public support systems (9%).

Natural hazards are characterized by the widespread prevalence of dangerous natural processes and phenomena associated with a cold, snowy winter climate, creating a rather high compared with other countries’ resistance to the environment, the industrial economy. In its territory, which has an extremely wide variety of geological, climatic conditions, there is more than 30 types of natural hazards (from about 50 in the whole world).

Distribution of natural disaster in the severity of the consequences differs from the distribution of man-made disaster: the maximum occurs not at the local, but global emergency level (emergency number distribution on the severity of the consequences). This is due, apparently, that because of adaptation to natural hazards of infrastructure disasters is at threshold, i.e. damage occurs only in the case of strong events in excess of the progress in the area for persistence infrastructure. But if this event occurred, by the space of negative factors in their levels exceed the levels of resistance to a large number of objects, which leads to considerable damage.

According to long-term observations, the greatest danger is flooding (subject to 746 cities), landslides and avalanches (725), earthquakes (103), tornadoes (500), It is with these processes is often associated huge social and economic damage.

Hazard mitigation specialists are demanded in any society. They serve to reduce losses, mitigate potential consequences, improve the sustainability of socio-economic systems at all levels (country, the subject of the federation, municipality, organization) and to implement measures to protect against disaster. However, the implementation of protection measures is also associated with considerable costs, which requires balancing the costs to prevent damage.

Therefore, hazard mitigation workers need to assess the effectiveness of measures to reduce them, and this requires reasonable knowledge about disaster management as well. For rare events, what are the emergency in some municipalities, these indicators should be based on indicators of risk.